“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.” — Plato

It didn’t take me too long to discover that men and women are not the same. Women like a nice glass of wine; men like beer. Women prefer romance novels; men prefer the sports section. Women like flowers; men… don’t like flowers.

Now, I’m not breaking any new ground here. I’m sure a few others have made this discovery as well. What about the workforce, though? From my brief research, it appears that it was the second wave feminists (basically those from the 1960’s) that were concerned with “gaining full social and economic equality, having already gained almost full legal equality in many western nations”. Yet, even today, it seems that the US is still not paying equal pay: A comparison frequently cited that women make 75.3 cents on the dollar to men is derived from statistics maintained by the United States Census Bureau 2003.

But even so, women in the 21st century have pretty much the same opportunites as men (in most developed countries). There are women firefighters, women police-officers, and women in the army. Why then, are there so few women in the webmaster world?

Perhaps I’m mistaken, but whenever I see a female webmaster or web designer, I must admit that I’m always surprised. About 4+ years ago I seem to have remembered more female graphic designers or web designers. Is this just my imagination, or did the dot-com bust have them scrambling? I have a lot of webmaster friends and collegues and have hired countless freelancers, yet none of them are women.

The only contact I seem to have with the other gender seems to usually be on phone calls or e-mails, usually with marketing agency reps.

I have no doubt that they are out there (the truth is out there), but why is there such an uneven ratio of men to women? Does the web entrepreneur and webmaster field bode too aggressive or risky to women, perhaps going against their gender’s nature? That is the only thing I can think of.

It would certainly be nice to see more women webmasters and web entrepreneurs, though.

In my previous blog post nearly a week ago, I had announced the completion of PublisherSpot.com. However, there were a few issues after I had made that announcement.

For one, the administration area had a small syntax error which prevented me from using it. There was also a CSS formatting bug which appeared in MSIE7 which was quite… annoying to fix. Fortunately, all of these problems have been addressed and the site is again working perfectly. I plan on researching and writing reviews for ad agencies soon.

I also had some banners made up for the site:

468×60 (Click)

468×60 #2 (Click)

728×90 #3(Click)

Another Interview

I’ve been interviewed again, this time by BuckBeingNormal.com. Here is a snippet:

One of your sites is a Poker Forum, you must be concerned by the recent developments in the US gambing laws. Are you having to make changes or launch new sites in order to keep current/future income steady?

I write my views on the ‘ban’ here which is a good summary on my views about it. It’s definitely hurting though and going to continue to hurt. I have a lot of collegues who it has hurt badly as well. In fact, I had made a phone call to CasinoPartners this afternoon, which I affiliate TitanPoker with, and had found out that Bruce, my affiliate manager, was just laid off yesterday… it’s an unfortunate and complete and utter disgrace, this bill. But I’m certainly not dead. I’m a fighter and today I had about 5 e-mails from inquisitive new advertisers. Two of them already paid me today.

Do you work alone or have a partner/employee?

Alone, baby! I’ve had a lot of people ask about partnering on some projects or sites, but I always decline, no matter who it is. To me, the con’s most heavily outweigh the pro’s of partnering. First off, you’re splitting the revenue 50/50. Secondly, how do you truely weigh the workload and make your partner work? Then there’s issues such as trust and security mixed in there as well. But mainly I feel why share half my income when I can keep it all myself?

Somebody head mentioned in my previous blog post that members who were logged into my blog were still forced to enter their Name and E-mail fields each time. I’m not sure why this didn’t work but I simply uploaded the original comments.php that came from the default skin and made a few minor HTML adjustments to it. Anyhow, it’s working fine now – you can simply comment without having to fill anything out.

2. Smilies Turned Off

I’ve turned the smiley parsing off. While I’d actually prefer smilies, they kept inserting a line break after them, messing up any formatting. Why is this happening? Is there an easy fix for this? Are the images perhaps just too big? If there’s an easy fix, I’d like to turn them back on, otherwise they’re staying off.

Update

A thank-you to rls who commented below. That indeed fixed the smiley problem and I’ve reimplemented the smiley parsing.

But in addition, it fixed a much bigger problem. I had just spent literally the past hour-and-a-half trying to figure out why WordPress would not allow me to display my banner images above on a new line. No matter what I tried… which was extremely confusing as earlier posts allowed me to do them and I don’t know why the CSS suddenly didn’t let me (I still don’t know why).

Your statistic on women, although correct is misleading. Although the average woman makes about 75% of the average man, keep in mind that more women stay at home with families than men. Women with children make a lot less than women with no children.

Great Tyler, now you have me all fired up and instead of working on a nifty new Word Press skin, I’m going to have blog about this.

[…] The bad: TylerCruz.com, the blog, is mostly news about what is going on in his life. That’s probably his goal, and it’s fine, but from a reader’s point of view, it’s hard to find the articles that provide real value. At most, his articles provide inspiration (because of the “it can be done!” factor). Most of them are along the line of these useless gems: Niche: Nitch or Neesh? or Where Are all the Women? or $11,000+ in 20 Days. Tyler’s writing style can be somewhat egotistical; there is little humility in his written thoughts. Below is an exerpt from an interview with Tyler by BuckBeingNormal: Absolutely! So describe to us an average working day in the world of Tyler Cruz. Okay, but you’re not going to like it. I usually wake up.. at any random time. I turn my computer on and let it boot up and stuff while I go get cleaned up. I’ll then go through a quick check-up my e-mails and forums and such. The rest of the day I’m usually playing a computer game, recently it has been Starcraft. I take breaks from playing my games to browse some blogs and forums. I’ll then take breaks to watch a movie or some TV and grab some grub. When I’m good and ready, and feel I have adequate energy, I’ll do a ‘work session’. This is usually 1-2 hours. I set my watch, put myself on Busy mode on MSN and get cracking. I’ll start by going through all my e-mails and responding to them. If I have any time left over (this actually takes quite a bit of time) I’ll get to work on my ‘todo’ list. My ‘todo’ list is a long list of things I write down in a file aptly named todo.txt which I should work on. After my 1-2 work session, that’s all the work I do for the day. I then go back to playing, eating, or watching TV or whatever it is I do. […]